I think a good amount of commander players can be convinced to pay for Rhystic Study, but as soon as one other player gets greedy that all seems to go out the window

I play with a lot of very good players that play around cards like rhystic study and archivist of Oghma. Smothering tithe is a little different because the tax is heavier, but they still put some thought into if they can pay or not

You mean having my 6+ CMC Commander get Darksteel Mutation'd on cast isn't fun!?

I think another commander that follows this idea is my Council of Four Deck. I focus on trying to fill my opponents hands which in returns gives me more knights. And unless it’s down to one v one or out of gas for their hands. They will always cast their second spell.

Ended up removing all my counter spells a few months ago for the sake of doing "stuff". New deck building mentality is just trying to do my "stuff" better than they can do theirs. Way less consistent, but much more satisfying!

Lotho is actually going to be interesting because it might encourage your opponents to cast spells so you ping yourself

In CEDH, you will eventually start wanting to play soft hate that generates value because you are greedy for the value and you want that value for cheap. Esper Sentinel is basically a 1 mana Bob in the game and Smothering Tithe is just a 4 mana hard to remove Seedborne Muse.

Lotho enabled me to have an engine in my Cadgar deck to draw about 3 cards per turn and my play group still played their 2nd spells each turn because they wanted to play the game.

Spells cast in first main for me are often because they either effect combat, even if it can't take part in combat (summoning sickness), or because combat doesn't matter and it's essentially a single main phase turn.

I think this kind of depends on the playgroup though. In my playgroup, we pay the rhystic study cost all the time. My friend played mystic remora and for 3 turns, none of us played any non creature spells so they just didn’t pay the cumulative upkeep and sacrificed it. We pay the costs and ruin it for the rhystic study players. But again, I think that’s just a play group thing.

Mystic remora is probably the only card where people (sometimes) will forego casting the spells they want because they know that if they can convince their other opponents to not feed the fish it will remove itself eventually.

I had a green player recently, who refused to activate any ramp spells or his fetches while I had Deep Gnome Terramancer on the field. I flashed him in T2 to no ramp spells, and for the rest of the game the gnome just sat there and did nothing. I ofc don't know the green player's hand, but he had a Panorama on the field and a Kodama's Reach in hand, but never activated either just to not give me a land. In the end I never used Gnome because the other two players were W/B and U/B/W

In my play group they do usually for these kinds of effects. This typically goes one of three ways. The person with the effect gets tunneled out of the game; It does absolutely nothing to the other players because they ramped like crazy or have infinite mana; or they criple their game to stop you from benifiring from your card.

In my playgroup everyone ALWAYS pays the one for Rhystic Study lol

I think also because casual edh often relys on creatures dealing damage to win that people cast their spells in their frist main phase, atleast towards the end of the game. To either amass large boards so they can attack or buff their creatures up so they can finish the game out, think jetmir or craterhoof

This patron interaction must’ve been something to warrant this vid 😂😂😂

I tried to make a deck that’s all cards that trigger off of what my opponents do but it was too hard to try and keep track of everything.

Great video.

I have a friend in my pod who PAYS. Almost always it feels like!

Let’s see a deck with the top 99 saltiest cards

So I have a Cleansing Wildfire in my Jund dragon deck, as I wanted thematic and non-green mana fix. Mana fixing is far less of an issue so I end up using it offensively. There is often one player at the table with a bounce land or an aura on their land and suddenly I get value. Admittedly, it is very harsh for a two mana cantrip.

Although Ghostly Prison is technically a tax, in practice it's effectively a stax card that prevents you from attacking a particular opponent. Lotho, Corrupt Shirriff is NOT stax, it doesn't prohibit you from doing anything, it just gives your opponent a bonus when you cast a second spell.

On Goading: I really dig some of the new Blue creatures that goad namely Mocking Doppleganger and Sly Instigator. I put both in my Unctus; I love how Sly Instigator might as well read Tap,Pay Blue to Goad opponents creature, they can't be blocked, Loot (Draw a card and discard a card). Mocking Doppleganger is becoming more of a staple to me Flash in a clone that copies the best creature on the board and goads all other creatures with the same name :P

Placement (aka synergies) plays a big roll. I think, rather than being just generically good, i like to run synergies. I have 2 rystic studies. On in a deck that is drawing cards, and i don't expect them to pay the 1, and another in my wheel deck where if they don't then i will draw 1 ping 1 every time.

Players definitely pay for rhystic study. It depends on the playgroup, but it definitely happens. Some pay every time.

My favorite deck is all about supercharging my opponents' decks and getting everyone to play the game. (Of course my deck is built to take advantage of all the extra game actions)

I pay the one as often as I can, but there's times where I need all my mana. I think these cards will give you a lot of value, but people will take those cards into consideration. I paid 6 to attack an enchantress deck yesterday, but it also killed them. But yes, depending what's in play, it might affect my play. I just build mono blue Vhal/Clan Crafter and could easily tap get for all the mana I need to pay the taxes and then untap her with various methods. Either way these cards will create value. Treasure Nabber is an instance of a card that people don't "pay". In that case, it's handing over control of a mana rock and I've watched a whole table stop using their mana rocks just to not let me borrow it. This was in a 5 player game even. So the cards do a little bit of both. Giving people options always puts them in control of how that card works, but mostly you get the stuff when they don't want to pay.

I play taxes! Archangel of tithes,ghostly prison,propaganda, smothering tithe, rhystic study, mana leak etc etc I love it.

You're 100% correct about all of it. I view my decks a little like a Rube Goldberg machine. I meticulously select 100 parts to throw together, usually with some kind of theme or mechanic or archetype in mind, and I love to watch it come together and finally work. I only run interaction or counter magic or board wipes because my typical group are way more proactive with those sorts of cards, so I'd never win if I didn't reciprocate. All I wanna do is build my stupid little machine and watch it do the thing, and if my opponent gets to draw a card every time I add a piece to by "do the thing" machine, then so be it. If they get a treasure? That's cool too. If you cast Cyclonic Rift and tear my machine apart piece by piece, I will hate you and your entire lineage. If you destroy my stupid little machine, or throw a big fuck off wrench into it, just for another player to win the next turn when your counter spell or destruction spell that you just fucked me with would have saved the game, I will never let you forget it. Taxes are inconsequential, so long as I get to build my machine, and if someone builds their machine faster, then that's fair and balanced commander and I won't be upset. But nothing will keep me from building my doofy little machine.

Just had a convo about this with my friends last night. The way I look at is that in general it's not worth paying any of the taxes except for Rhystic study. I will pay the tax for UPTO 2 cycles after it came down. If everyone at the table does it too then I feel as if that wasted enough gas for the Rhystic player.

My friends always complain about smothering tithe while im a huge advocate for always paying the 2 on ur draw unless ur deck is based around draw spells. Theyll tell me "if i pay the two everytime im gonna lose cuz i wont be able to do anything" when in reality, u lose if you let the player with the smothering tithe get 10-15 treasures for free. Ive tried convincing them to imagine that your two worst lands are just tapped until we remove the smothering tithe and that what you play will have to work around that hinderence and if you have a really massive play you need to pull of in 1 turn or need the extra mana to survive then fine. But otherwise, two worst lands, just keep em tapped

This is mostly all true for any group, but I have a gix deck which should encourage people to attack each other for resources, but I swear it just makes them want to kill me instead when he hits the table. As if they are offended that I try to direct them into hitting each other, they hit me out of spite. Or sometimes it seems that way at least

For me, SOME people will tolerate the tax to a point. Example, if 2 people already agreed to pay the tax or prevent themselves doing their 2nd cast, then most likely the 3rd will follow suit. However, ive noticed that after 2-3 turns, Demo's right, people will give up in holding themselves back, when the problem still continues, if no one destroyed the Studies/Tithe for at least 2 or 3 turns, everyone stops paying, and the ONE player who still paying is hosing themselves because the other players are offsetting the balance. But the most interesting thing is, no one chooses to use their removal, not being its an Enchantment and Black (example) doesnt have endless Enchantment removal. Theyre all waiting for that One Guy whose gonna "promise" to use Farewell, which they never do.

Good. Vid

I really want to build a "opponents can't.." tribal deck

Lol what pods are you playing against?

You don’t care about searching when there’s an archivist out. You care about searching when there’s an opp agent because it puts you at a disadvantage unlike archivist which is just small advantage for your opponent that won’t effect you.

Not only they will not pay. They won't removed it from play, because they are holding for some bigger spell to deal with later on. Which is a gamble. That happened to me. I end up with 30 treasure tokens that I did not use, because I have enough lands and doubling mana. I still won the game, but I end up of useless treasures I did not expect will happen. The same thing with drawing cards. I did not expect to draw my library that I lost. I did not have a Lab, Thassa and a Jace, because that was not the design of my deck.

IdK I have had MANY experiences in EDH where players will pay the cost for Rhystic Study...perhaps it is just my play groups but the advantage it gives is so strong that most of the time my friends and myself are willing to pay for the Rhystic Study to prevent such an imbalance.

Another video playing into the fact we should just have a secondary banlist for lower power. My main argument: if you dont have to play around stuff you have more deckslots for fun stuff. No glacial casm -> no need for landdestruction, same for many other cards.

What even if they pay the tax? It still slows them down. Its win-win for you, lose-lose for them. Thats why i only play them very rarely.

I've actually played against a guy who actively tried to not play Islands when I played Carpet of Flowers. I'm like great! thats almost just as valuable as me getting the extra mana.

I feel like it depends the pod I play with 3 different pods and one group is very loose and do what they want and my two other groups when we use high power decks we will play around tax cards all the time. So it depends if your opponent has a card in had I will always pay for any tax to not give them advantage or I’ll do it for politics in whatever way. So I agree but it depends the pod

Agree with this pov 1000%

As far as Lotho goes, I'm not sure how good he can be in general, but he's just highly meta dependent. My main playgroups are not going to be casting two spells in one turn, they are going to be casting spells on every else's turn. Outside of them, the generic commander players I run into are casting one ramp spell into one midgame value spell a turn, until they can cast one big thing that costs all or most of their mana. They might have one or two turns where they help the Lotho player, but I'm not sure that's worth having a deck built around him. It's me who's going to be giving the Lotho player treasures. 😂 As far as tax and things like Rhystic Study I think I experience about 50/50; my main playgroups like strategy enough to discern when you should let a player get ahead of you, build your own board state and let them become arch enemy and when you can't let them. Prison effects only work for so long before your opponent runs out of things to do and can use their mana to pay the tax. The people who just want to do what they want to do regardless of what is happening are the most likely to run out of gas. Then they might pay to alpha strike you just to make up for all the turns they couldn't. Pairing prison with a board wipe later works pretty good though.

I recently had a game against an Enchantress player who had a great turn and out of nowhere suddenly had like four layers of defenses: all enchantments except one had hexproof, the opponent couldn't be damaged, and something else I forgot. I scooped on my turn, because he was untouchable and I didn't have the resources to remove several layers of enchantments, and I'd be dead by the time I would have them. I just didn't want to deal with that.

I'm currently making this deck. Ishai and kraum partners, with a pyramidscheme theme. I get paid for your work

@EDHDeckbuilding hey if you are up for a challenge can you do a deck build for a commander that never gets playtime like Balthor the Defiled Minions tribal deck

5:26 because EDH is a casual format, played by casual players (or players who don't want to think at that moment). Therefore no, they're not going to play at their best.

I stopped playing anything besides cEDH because the average commander player would remove a stax piece ACTIVELY stopping a win on board because they can't tap a mana dork for mana and then they'd have the AUDACITY to bitch about losing to the other player. Yes, this ACTUALLY HAPPENED. A friend had a kiki jiki combo on board with a Purphoros on board and I had Linvala. I play almost exclusively Derevi btw.

I think stax has a very very important place in higher power games, its a necessary evil to shut down combo decks and turbo stuff. bUT if I sit down to a clearly casual game that everyone decides is casual and you bust out a taxes super stax deck im just leaving

I never pay for these things. I don’t care about winning or giving others advantages, I just want my deck to go brrrr and do the thing. If I can do the thing, regardless of if I win or lose, I am happy.

I lose my whole entire mind when people don't pay for rhystic study

I get the points of this video but man idk how i feel about the statement people wont pay for smothering tithe or rhystic study , at 3 different lgs in my local area majority of players would pay ofc its mostly situational but like 8/10 players would think about it rather then auto let it happen the remainibg 2/10 just say " expect you always have it from me " kinda deal. Rhystic study is essentially just a tax spells by 1 enchantment like grand augestine 4th. The pods i usually join are like 5-6 casuals or 7-9 high power casual no cedh for reference of the type of mindset of players in my typical pods i guess ? And yeah people dont like stax because when you show up to a table to play a game you expect to play said game lol. I'm personally alright with stax if the rule 0 is were playing higher power casual and such. I wouldnt bring stax into a lot of casual pods tho as its simply unfun and just sweaty to get wins.

I feel like my pod plays around this kind of stuff when we can, though we have banned a few of these cards because they are unfun to play against. We basicly allow anything as long as it isn't making the game unfun, these cards do because they are just there to do busted things because people do not pay.

Lotho, unless explicitly on board dangerous to do so, would never stand in my way of playing a whole second card. Compared to rhystic, though, I will pay it unless it stops me from making a huge splashy play.

Idk, in my pod, people always evaluate if their gain is worth giving the opponent the advantage. We usually don't pay for Smothering Tithe or Mystic Remora because those are expensive, but casting my 1 big thing instead of 2 smaller things so my opponent doesn't get a Lotho trigger? Absolutely! Delaying my instant-speed removal to get around Ledger Shredder? Of course!

This was my major gripe after years of playing Yugioh. So much of the modern game is simply preventing the other person from playing. Like, there's still a balance and rhythm to it, I'm not saying the game is broken. But it just doesn't feel good to play above casual level for me when everything you do gets countered.

TBH the tables I play at do pay the 2. Mystic remora on average is like 1 card for 6 mana lol

I rat brain my instants till i sse a reason to hold at times so when i see this i would hold back just to not needlessly feed it but if i need to interact im not caring

Lotho actually sees a lot of play some cEDH lists

In my playgroup we are stubborn, so Ghostly Prison got pushed out of the meta. Someone would play it, and the rest of us would make them archenemy and conspire to knock them out. We don't like being told we can't attack.

I have to say this at every table “PAYYYYYY THE TAX” DO NOT LET TITHE AND STUDY GO UNCHECKED

I don't play commander; I wonder if it is because I would always pay for Rhystic Study, lol.

In high power and cedh metas, yes rhystic study and and cards like that are ridiculous. That being said they arent casual cards; ghostly prison effects are fine just slightly annoying, but straight tax, stax, and “i play the game not you” is bs for casual edh. Ppl went into edh with their 1v1 legacy and modern mindsets and now we have ppl showing up to casual edh day with only cedh decks and no casual options……edh is meant for casual, keep your cedh and 1v1 mindset separate!

Agreed, but to me Rhystic Study and Smothering Tithe are terrible examples of this, just because they're too good at taxing. So even in a disciplined tax paying pod, they're still insane, cause of the mana advantage they provide.

Anyone else’s playgroup pays for rhystic study but never smothering tithe ?

#truth

Stax is hated bc extreme stax that stop basic lands from untapping slow an already slow game mode down. Stax is hated bc it’s usually applied asymmetrically where 1 player is playing solitaire while the other 3 can’t. Stax is hated bc it feels unfair. Rhystic Study drawing one player cards bc 2 other players didn’t pay is baffling. It’s the nature of the format. Having 3 opponents and benefiting from it feels bad. It feels unfair if you cast a wheel with either a Naset or Smothering Tithe on the field. It’s the reason HullBreaker was banned. There’s such a huge difference in power to these cards and say a card that says “pay 3 mana draw 10 cards” its bc these cards aren’t meant for this format. They’re meant for 1v1 formats. And it shows. Wheeling and getting 21 treasures feels like winning the game. Like it shouldn’t be THAT easy. It’s the same Tergrid feels bad to play against. A smallpox would be a 4 for 3 but it becomes a 4 for 9 in commander. Its why board wipes are efficient but counterspells and spot removal aren’t. Commander is broken but we still love it. Stax or no stax. Preferably no winter orb/stasis.

Over half of my group would rather play slow then help out the rystic study player 😅

my friends pay the 1 for rhystic all the time. They don't want me to enter the infinite.

I kinda disagree. I always pay if im on curve and not missing land drops. And people should be paying. Because feeding that one player by not pay 1 or 2 measly mana ends up finding their combo piece and winning the game from draw a million cards and getting a mmilion treasures. Pay your taxes and stop giving your opponents free wins.

The real question is, should we let all commander players do what they want to do?

i need everyone to realize that this does not include cedh

For this topic, why even bother playing a multiplayer game at this point? When we take out all the cards than involve other players, the group is basically playing four games of solitaire separately.

At least half of the people I play with pay for most of those things because if you don't in a 4+ player game it is too much advantage. I usually agree with a lot you say but here is where we differ

This plays into my personal view on heuristics for the format. “Always pay the one/two” “always vote x” (though that one is genuinely typically true, expropriate) etc. The game is huge and nuanced. Yeah denying your opponent cards off of rhystic is probably good, but compare two cards in hand vs like a 3 drop and 4 drop with synergies with your deck is potentially more powerful. The odds that they will draw lands or something that will be a problem later rather than now… I genuinely don’t think that it’s always correct to pay. If you can, yes. If your play is likely better than some card draw, do it. It might seem risky, but that also sounds fun!

People that think ghostly prison is a bad card clearly don't have any token aggro decks in there meta😅

I love tax

I hate hyper efficient proactive players, way more than control

i love this video. it feels like its a tutorial on how to play stax. i personally love stax and dont mind going against it, and youre right. stax is good because edh players just wanna do stuff. stax just keeps them from doing stuff.

Controversial Opinion: Commander players enjoy playing the game

Giving resources to your opponent is much better that paying the tax and be one or two turns behind everybody else. Plus the extra resources makes them a target so it can backfire to them.

I like playing against Stacks. it makes you think way more about what you want to play. you have to value your cards a lot more.

I am the type of player that will be very quick to say 'No.' the moment I do whatever the action is solely so that they know I don't care. Yes, paying taxes is a good idea, but it pisses me off so much. It's why I hate Azorius - mainly Blue. I played a game against New Heliod and it was awful having him pump cards drawn for everyone with a Smothering on board. Cool, he has all the draw and all the mana and cost reduc to counter things. If cards in your deck - or just the color/combination - cause me to say 'Mother, may I' then I think it might not be fun.